How to Create Viral Content: 10 Insights from 100 Million Articles

A while back, someone sent me a link to the BuzzSumo website. With a name that includes “Sumo,” I knew it was love at first sight.

And the love has lasted. Years later, I still use BuzzSumo regularly. It’s a gold mine of data for analyzing content’s popularity, social growth, and more.

#chaching.

Because I’m so impressed with the platform, I reached out to awesome people at BuzzSumo to let us go behind-the-scenes for the main ingredients to insanely shareable content are.

You’ve probably seen lame articles on the web like “10 ways to go viral” with super basic tips for creating shareable content. But his post crushes those posts, because it’s backed by pure data. (Who doesn’t love some fancy images and charts?)

Use this knowledge with caution. And without keeping you waiting anymore, take it away Sumo brothers…

Here at BuzzSumo, we've analyzed the social share counts of over 100 million articles in the past 8 months. So it’s fair to say we have a pretty good idea of what gets shared the most.

There has always been some nagging questions we’ve wanted to answer. So we came up with this set of questions, hoping to challenge popular assumptions on how to make your content go viral:

What types of emotions did the most popular articles invoke?

What formats of posts typically receive a lot of shares? (lists? infographics?)

Did readers love to share short form or long form content? What's the ideal length to maximize readability?

Does trust play a major role on whether someone will share an article?

What's the effect of having just one image in a post vs no images?

What's the effect of having just one influencer sharing your article vs 0?

How do we make people share our post days and even weeks after it’s been published?

What’s the best day of the week to publish an article?

Of course, all these questions come with a giant warning...

The prerequisite to getting your content shared widely is to write compelling content.

There's just no replacement for that. No gimmicks, tricks, or sleight-of-hand to trick users into making crappy clickbait go viral.

But once you’ve written a well-crafted, useful article, how do you make sure it sticks out among all the noise?

For those of you with content you’re proud of, I’m excited to introduce you to a formula you can use to increase the chances your content goes viral.

Here are 10 ingredients that will help increase the shareability of your content:

1) Long form content gets more social shares than short form content.

We've all heard stats on how more people are consuming content through their mobile devices. This means you should write short, bite-sized content to satisfy your readers's short attention spans, right?

We analyzed the top 10% most shared articles to see if this was the case... and according to our research, the opposite is true.

Put this chart on your site

If you look at the chart above, you'll notice something: the longer the content, the more shares it gets.
Specifically, 3,000-10,000 word content gets the most average shares (8,859).

Not surprisingly, there was a lot more short-form content being written — which caused a lot more noise. How much more? There was 16 times more content with less than 1,000 words than there was content with 2,000+ words.

This tells us that most people just aren’t willing to create in-depth, well-researched articles packed with insights. They just don’t want to put in the time and effort.

Which means there's a lot more opportunity for you to create great content and stand out from the pack. Less competition!

The fact is that, yes people love to share LOL cat pics and funny memes, but they also want to share intellectually challenging, long-form content. Since the web is inundated with short-form content and gifs, you're better off spending your time writing that one epic piece of content that has less competition instead of writing lots of short, fluffy pieces.

2) Having at least one image in your post leads to more Facebook shares

We’ve all hear experts say compelling images increases engagement. But that only applies to social posts on Facebook, right? What about actual written content?

This time, we analyzed all the articles we’ve crawled at BuzzSumo to compare the average number of Facebook shares of content with:

1 or more images

0 images

Here's what we found:

Share this graph on your site

In other words, on average, twice as many people share posts with at least one image in the post.

This underscores the importance of having visual elements mixed in with bodies of text.

(Keep in mind though, we didn’t do any analysis on how visually appealing these images were, just the presence of an image.)

What about social meta tags for Facebook?

We were curious whether publishers that implemented these tags — specifically the preview image received more Facebook shares — on average. Again, we’d expected this to be true, but we wanted to see how dramatic this difference was.

Want to put this image on your own site?

(By the way, for those not familiar, if you wanted Facebook to show a specific preview image, you’d need to implement this meta tag in the <head> section of your article: <meta property=”og:image” content=”http://example.com/image.jpg” />)

The results: articles that implemented the Facebook preview image meta tag had more than three times as many Facebook shares and likes compared to those that didn’t.

Key Ingredient: Implement those social meta tags and add a photo to EVERY post! The images determine what potential readers see before they even visit your article. Click to Tweet

3) Having at least one image in your post leads to more Twitter shares

Perhaps unsurprisingly, based on the last point’s results (Facebook social image matters) is that Twitter is the same.

Posts with the Open Graph image tag did substantially better on Twitter than those without:

Yo, share this image!

Key Ingredient:Adding images to your content and posts will help it get shared on Twitter as well as Facebook! Click to Tweet

We analyzed the top 10,000 most shared articles across the web, and mapped each one to an emotion, like joy, sadness, anger, amusement, laughter, etc.

Here's the breakdown of emotions:

Why not share this pie chart with your readers?

The most popular 3 emotions invoked were:

Awe (25%)

Laughter (17%)

Amusement (15%).

Conversely, the least popular emotions were sadness and anger (which made up 7%).

(Note the difference between laughter and amusement were blurry at times, but we define amusement as being entertained, and not laugh out loud funny.)

Why do people share things that inspire awe, laughter and amusement? We don't have a scientific reason for it, but the New York Times did a research study a few years back.

They interviewed 2,500 people to determine the primary reasons they shared a story online. These were the main reasons they found:

Bring valuable and entertaining content to one another

Define themselves to others (give people a better sense of who they are)

Grow and nourish relationships (stay connected with others)

Self-fulfillment (to feel more involved in the world)

Get the word out on causes they care about

Awe-inspiring and funny content definitely fulfill the first three reasons. Sharing entertaining content brings value to our friends, shows others we have great taste, and spurs conversation and reactions.

People also share for selfish reasons, like narcissism.

8 of the top 10 most shared articles in the past 8 months were quizzes (7 from BuzzFeed, 1 from New York Times). Why quizzes?

When we share our quiz results, it fuels our identity and ego. Others will learn more about who we are, what we value, and our tastes. Think about the last time you shared a quiz. Do you really think 90% of your Facebook friends actually care? No, but the few who do will know what a cool person you are.

Similarly, sharing an opinionated piece about a hot issue, such as gay marriage lets others know where we stand on the issue.

Bottom-line is quizzes work. People share content which helps them identify who they are. Being controversial may divide the crowds, but those who agree with you are more likely to share your content.

Key Ingredients: Be entertaining... Nobody wants to bore their friends. Click to Tweet

5) People love to share lists and infographics

We were curious which content formats people were more likely to share. So we classified each article in our analysis into six types:

Lists

Infographics

How-to articles

"What" posts (e.g. articles whose title started with the word “What”)

"Why" posts (e.g. articles that tried to answer a “Why” question)

Videos

Here's what we discovered:

Your audience would love this graph. Put it on your site

(Note: All Content is the average shares of all content we analyzed, and is meant to be a benchmark.)

List posts and infographics receive more average shares than other content types.

More surprisingly, how-to posts and videos receive less shares than the average post.

There are many possible reasons why list posts get shared the most. Some possible reasons: Lists give the readers an exact idea on what to expect (i.e. 10 ways to do something), they’re also skim-friendly, and easy to read on the run.

Similarly, infographics make it easier to digest a huge amount of information in a visually appealing way.

Either way, make sure your content has plenty of images or charts, so readers aren’t intimidated by so much text.

Key ingredient: If you’re writing long-form content, remember to keep it easier to scan, and not a wall of text. Structuring it as a list post is a simple way to do that, but if you’re not writing a list, make sure you write easy to read paragraphs, and use sub-headlines and bullet points. Click to Tweet

6) 10 is the magic number for lists

Let's cut right to it: 10 item lists on average received the most social shares with 10,621 social shares.

In fact, lists of 10 had four times as many social shares on average than the second most popular list number (23). The other runner-ups are 16 and 24.

Key Ingredient: If you’re writing a list post, try to round it up or down to 10 items. Click to Tweet

7) People tend to share content that looks trustworthy

Does trust play a role with content sharing?

To answer, we compared the average number of social shares for two types of content:

No byline or bio attached to the content

Articles with a byline or bio

The results show the importance of a byline.

Byline, and implied trust, play a major role on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+.

You know you wanna share this chart with your content friends

(Note: The numbers are normalized below to 100, as the absolute numbers aren’t important, just the difference.)

However, trust doesn’t seem to make a difference in Facebook.

Articles with a byline or bio have 0.10% more social shares than those without a byline/bio. In contrast, in Google+, articles with a byline/bio have 42% more social shares than those without a byline or bio.

Byline trust not playing a major role on Facebook suggests users share different types of content in each social network. We usually sharing entertaining, funny content on Facebook with our close friends.

But on Twitter, Linkedin, and Google+, most of our followers are people we are associated with professionally. Since our “persona” matters more on these platforms, most people prefer to share content from a trustworthy source to build our credibility.

Key Ingredient: Remember to have a byline at the beginning of every post, and a bio at the end to make your content look trustworthy. Click to Tweet

8) Getting one extra influencer to share your article has a multiplier effect.

Not all sharers are created equal.

After all, if Oprah, Tim Ferriss, or Noah shared your article with their followers, it'll generate more retweets/likes than if a random person shared it.

What if someone just a teeny-tiny bit more influential than the average person shares your content? How many more additional people will share as a result? Can we predict that?

We compared the number of social shares of articles that had 0 influential sharers to content that had one or more influential sharers.

To formalize things, we define “influencer” as someone whose tweets are retweeted on average two times.

For instance, if you tweeted 100 times total, and 200 people retweeted those tweets, the average retweets would be 2.0 (This sounds like a low number, but for comparison, someone like Noah has an average retweet of 5.1)

Here's what we found:

One influential person sharing your content resulted in 31.8% more social shares

Three influential people sharing your content doubled the number of social shares

Five influential people sharing your content almost quadrupled the total number of social shares for an article

Hey, you. Put this image on your blog, will ya?

That’s great, but how do you get more influencers to share your content without relying on blind luck?

One way is to work backwards. Instead of writing your content first, find a piece of content that is similar to the one you want to produce, and see all the influencers that shared it. Then start building a relationship with those influencers before you launch your post.

For instance, let’s say you want to write an article about “conversion optimization”. With BuzzSumo, you can find the most shared articles on conversion optimization in the past 6 months using the Top Content Search.

You’ll see a list of results like below:

The first result above has 2,039 shares from conversionxl.com. You can see who shared this article by clicking on the “View Sharers” button. There you’ll see a list of people who shared this article on Twitter, sorted by average retweets. In other words, it’s sorted by their influence level.

There are a couple of other useful fields you’ll see for each sharer, including the number of followers they have, and their reply ratio (% of tweets that are direct replies to someone). While number of followers is a more common metric people use to measure influence, it can easily be faked. Average retweets are very hard to fake (or not as likely).

To find a list of influencers, I recommend you search for more than one article to compile a list of influencers. Once you have this list, you can reach out to each of them and ask:

For a quote you’ll use in your article

Questions to get feedback on an idea

Link to something they wrote about your topic.

People love to share things they’ve been involved in, even if they weren’t involved in it directly. If you can incorporate these influencers into your article, they’ll be more likely to share your article with their own followers.

(Note: Remember, influential people have no obligation to share your content, don’t be too pushy in getting them to do so for you. Relationship ALWAYS comes first.)

9) Repromote your old content on a regular basis.

The next thing we analyzed is the % drop in social shares after you’ve published your post for 3 days. Most people will share your post in the first few days, and then those shares will taper off, but by how much?

The result was rather depressing. After three days, on all social networks, the number of shares dropped at least 96% for the next four days. Facebook shares drop the most, and Google+ and Pinterest drop the least:

Facebook: 98.9% decrease

Twitter: 97.4% decrease

LinkedIn: 97.34% decrease

Google+: 96.7% decrease

Pinterest: 96.7% decrease

After the first week, the number of shares for the next three weeks drops at least 86%. Twitter shares drop the most, and Linkedin shares drop the least.

Twitter: 92.1% decrease

Google+: 90% decrease

Facebook: 89% decrease

Pinterest: 86% decrease

LinkedIn: 82% decrease

This is inevitable, right?

Well, we decided to analyze the anomalies. We dug into the articles which actually had more social shares after a week had passed, and analyzed what they did.

One of those articles was a blog post by Evernote which only garnered 23 Facebook shares after a week. However, after a month, it had a total of 181 shares — an increase of 686% (!!!).

After doing some digging up, we saw the reason why: they repromoted that post 11 days on Facebook after it was published:

We don’t have any hard data on the ideal waiting period before repromoting content. Our hunch, however, says about a week.

Here, Evernote published their piece on a Monday, and promoted it on a Friday the next week. A solid strategy would be to promote pieces you write on Friday and weekends on a more popular day like Monday a week later. This will ensure all your posts get the same amount of exposure.

Of course, a prerequisite of this is to write evergreen content, since it can be shared and repromoted anytime after you’ve published it.

But what if your old posts aren’t evergreen?

There’s still a way to promote old posts if it ties into an upcoming event. For example, we found an infographic about influencers to meet in SMWW (a social media marketing conference) that had 72 twitter shares after a week, but 487 whopping Twitter shares after a month. What was their secret?

The infographic was published initially on March 10th, and then shared again on Twitter March 28th, the day of the conference. This timely share dramatically increased the number of Twitter reteweets and shares.

Key Ingredient: Don’t let your content be a 1-hit wonder! Repromote your old posts at least a week after it’s been published. Alternatively, find old content that ties into an upcoming event/holiday, and repromote that the day of the event. Click to Tweet

10) The best day overall to publish content for social shares is Tuesday

The day of the week you publish your content can have a big effect on how much it's shared. Take a look at the chart below, which shows the number total shares by day of week for all content we analyzed:

If you love tacos, you'll put this image on your blog, website, or web forum

You can see more content is shared during the week, with the start of each week having the highest volume of shares. Generally content gets the most shares on Tuesday or Monday, depending on the social network:

Best Day Overall: Tuesday

Best Day For Facebook: Tuesday

Best Day for Google+: Tuesday

Best Day for Twitter: Tuesday

Best Day for Linkedin: Monday

Best Day for Pinterest: Monday

Key Ingredient: Publish and share your content on Monday or Tuesday to get more shares. Click to Tweet.

Conclusion

To summarize, here are the 10 data-driven insights you should be aware of when creating highly shareable content:

Long-form content has less competition — and gets more shares on average

Use images on Facebook

Use images on Twitter

Inspire awe, laughter, or amusement

List posts and infographics are more likely to be shared. If you’re writing a long form article, make sure it’s easy to skim

10 is the magic number of lists (see what we’re doing here?)

Make sure your article inspires trust

Reach out to influencers before you write your content... and after to get it shared

If you can't see the PDF, it usually means you have an ad blocker. Try loading the page Incognito, or disabling your adblocker temporarily. You can also whitelist okdork.com — there are no ads on the site, so you won't be bombarded. 🙂

I've been trying to find ways to get more traffic to my WordPress blog, Youngfiction21, and my Medium, Alex Chavers. It is pretty difficult starting out, but I believe this article gives a lot of good points. I actually did not know that longer articles generate the most "viral" content. I just assumed people skip by that kind of stuff when they see it. Anyway, I'll have to remember these tips. Some I've gotten down, while others I'm still working on. Thanks a lot!

Had so much trouble with our previous SEO company,
I have been researching it in my spare time and next
time we are going to employ temp staff to sort it
Bookmarked your blog, should help me keep up with regular posts!

Hi! We have just launched a blog about activities from our everyday lives in the Arctic. It is great to be able to blog and chat with people around the world even when we live in sparsely populated parts of the world. Our new blog we have chosen to call for Wealth and Work in the Arctic - An Northern Dimension. We have very much benefit from your tips to promote our blog. Thank you and welcome to visit, comment and share our blog too.

All mentioned techniques are fruitful, but therefore I am a little bit confused regarding emotion in content if my industry based on the dry industry then how can I add emotion factors in content. I think it's hard to show some emotions in a post.

First off I want to say superb blog! I had a
quick question which I'd like to ask if you don't mind. I was interested to find out how you center
yourself and clear your thoughts prior to writing.
I have had trouble clearing my mind in getting my thoughts
out. I do take pleasure in writing but it just
seems like the first 10 to 15 minutes are usually
wasted just trying to figure out how to begin. Any suggestions or hints?
Kudos!

If you can create content that makes people feel smart or funny by sharing your post, then you have winning content that can go viral. Now I need to figure out how to create content that make them feel smart or funny.

Pets are one that needs to care and should look after like
our baby. For taking perfect care for our pets and animal we should follow some techniques and also some
little matters which can have huge effect on our animal’s
life. In this site, we will easily have all sorts of news and info’s about cats, dogs, birds, monkeys,
horses, cows etc & etc. Not only info's but also well written and guided PDF for offline
readings. So this site is a complete Wikipedia for our pets and animals at anytime and
at anywhere

While I'm certain each practices will grow to be more and morre widespread, what I even have seen is that when individuals use electronic mail in place oof a letter, tthe standard of presentation typically declines.

I want to write some quality post which attracts most traffic not to be viral. Nor getting famous my site bengaliworld.wordpress.com just putting some comments or some spammy links on other blogsite. Please advise me.

I don't know if it's just me or if perhaps everybody
else experiencing issues with your site. It appears as
though some of the text within your content are running off the screen. Can someone else please comment and let me know if this is happening
to them as well? This could be a problem with my internet browser because
I've had this happen previously. Many thanks

Can I just say what a comfort to uncover someone that genuinely understands what they're discussing online.

You certainly know how to bring a problem to light and make it important.
A lot more people need to check this out and understand this
side of the story. It's surprising you are not more popular given that you most certainly have the
gift.

I am under the impression that viral makes Google rank your site higher in search results since more people are clicking on it, sharing it, etc. So even if like some folks have mentioned, viral does not necessarily equate to value, it most likely helps with site ranking, and that cant be a bad thing, right? Maybe I am wrong, but that is the impression I get. Thank you for this great read and in depth analysis. It was very informative and helpful!

I like that the authors applied most of their own tips in this article. Hello, list of 10 items!

What I have found is that I am most likely to click on content that will benefit me in a very concrete way. For instance, if I'm starting a blog, then any blog post that specifically tells me how to grow my audience will catch my attention. You've mentioned that sharing content can be a narcissistic pursuit. This applies to article reflecting who you are, but also articles telling you how to become rich and famous! Is there any data backing that up, besides measuring "How to" articles?

Oh my goodness.
I'm late to the party on this one but OKDork just became my new favourite site. This information is awesome. I'm currently writing a blog post on how to go viral which has paled into complete insignificance in the shadow of this majestic behemoth.
This is how it should be done. I'm in awe.

I am surprised that a posts that inspire awe emotion is one of top three posts that will go viral. A lot of time when I browse through my facebook, I saw many of my friends share stuff that invoke laughter and awe. I also received a lot of posts that invoke anger especially when it is posts related to politics. It just funny, politic posts that shared seldom invoke positive emotion(just realized it).......

From my experience, I think posts that invoke anger get pretty much engagement. When there is a "angry" posts, I see that people comment more than "laughter" post.

I'm a personal trainer that runs a blog. I'd like to get out of the one on one stuff and just write blogs and do videos. With so many blogs and trainers out there I'm wondering how I can stand out besides my humor and great advice.

Number 10 is fascinating. The fact that some social networks are Mondays and others are Tuesday is really interesting. LinkedIn I imagine is because people are back at work Monday morning and on LinkedIn. Pinterest however surprises me. Maybe its unemployed people killing time. Really fascinating and great stuff you have here Noah. This saves countless time trying to split test this stuff ourselves. Thank you.

This was crazy good. I was especially happy to hear about the longer content being key. Although numerically it is important, however if you aren't concise and straight to the point, you will lose them. I think the real factor for those being a winner is that to 'really' cover a topic, you need to go into detail. And those articles that cover a topic well, are the ones that people feel need to be shared.

I am all about using other people's networks to get the word out about my business and personal brand. I am an Instagrammer and Redditor, eclectic visual based communities. If I even THINK I will use their product in the near future, I'll follow them, like, comment, etc. I'm engaged. I will use their products in artistic projects and tag them with the result. Effective! They love it, share it, I get to crack my preverbial creative knuckles, and my influence gets a little bit bigger. #winning

We want jobs, world-class education, and healthcare that doesn't have to check out its shoulder
for ambulance chasers. One o f the best Indian travel tips is the ever changing climate of India, the cycle
of climate is fixed in such a fashion that it remains favorable to a tourist at most
part of the year.

Extremely valuable points for any serious online entrepreneur/blogger, thanks for sharing. I have been a consistent user and now a huge fan of SumoMe apps and BuzzSumo search - with these I've been able to get valuable insights into the content I publish on my blogs.

Noah,
Great stuff!
".... get them involved in your content in some way such as: -Asking them for a quote you’ll use in your article"
The power of getting influencers can't be overstated. I recently published a post on Social Media Today. In it, I had in-depth quotes from 9 (imagine if I'd had 10!) social media leaders. The post received nearly 1,000 LinkedIn shares, 400 Google+ shares, and 500 Tweets.
Why?
Most of those quoted in the article also shared it on their networks. In addition, their presence in the article made it more likely to be shared, for the reasons you note. It also furthers your relationship with those quoted, making future endeavors that much easier. You're also more likely to be quoted by others, either about the article, or new pieces.
Thanks for the excellent research!
Steve

It'd be helpful to see the comparative effect of each item you've listed. For example, under point 2, if the total population of posts is split 28% no image, 65% 1 or more image, then the fact that well-shared posts are in the same proportion doesn't necessarily imply any correlation between having an image and being well posted. If, however, the split in the population of posts is, say, 50%:50%, then having an image would appear to influence reposting. Conversely, if 5% of all posts have no image, then the opposite of what is implied by your graph would probably be true.

Point 1 shows this additional info required to complete the picture somewhat, but the rest of the points are missing the piece of the puzzle required to complete the inference.

One other point: correlation isn't cause. For example, having more influencers may cause more reposting; or alternatively higher reposting could have been caused by a great post, which in turn caused more influencers to repost it (or whatever) which creates correlation between influencers and reposting.

That was a killer post bro. Most people are lazy as hell and being spoon fed that you do nothing and make a killing Online. Nothing can be further from the truth. Writing is an investment and will yield assets if you're smart on how you do it. Opt-ins are score keepers. Those emails will create residual income opportunities, but you still have to remember that people want kick-ass content, not watered down b.s. that has no centric value.

As per #4--- and include the word "Actually"!! What was that-- 4 out of the six titles that were most shared included the word "actually". Or are they playing on our insecurity of knowing "who" we actually are.
What Career Should You Actually Have?
What Kind Of Dog Are You?
What State Do You Actually Belong In?
How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk
What City Should You Actually Live In?
Which Decade Do You Actually Belong In?

It's career-- place -- time.. What job, what location, city or state, and what time period... Your identity. What is your identity based on-- your job... where you live.. and then are you 80s, 90s, etc... hmmm brainstorming what to do with that.

We all need to be paying more attention to sharing...not just for traffic, not just for eyeballs or even for potential sales, but for search. I've been hearing a lot lately that Google's last round of SERPs changes were infrastructure related to decreasing the importance of backlinks and toward increasing ranking your pages and posts based on the amount your content is shared.

One of my favorite examples from the book is about the photo gallery of the bankrupt, decaying city of Detroit. Which got more shares, the photos with homeless people, or ones of just buildings? Awe and anxiety/anger are more viral than sadness.

There will always be haters out there who dis trying to make something go viral. They miss the point that it's about making content more appealing by making it appeal to human nature. Understanding human nature is what it's about. I'm a tech geek. That's why I avidly read topics like this. I need help in getting messages across better.

There's so much good content out there that doesn't get the reach it deserves. Knowing how to make your content more shareable helps. This is relevant even for non-profits, governments and school boards of education who struggle with getting things funded, passed, supported.

One of the most comprehensive guides I've ever read on the topic! I'm a living example of all the points in the article. One of my posts went viral (mostly on FB) and so far has been shared more than 5.3K times. It is a long detailed article (more than 4000 words, many pictures, and useful for the readers.

The main key for me has been the influential bloggers/pages that promoted it on their social media, as well as using extracts of my comments in other articles.

The idea of keeping promoting the post weeks after its pubblication is also a good strategy!

This is useful and insightful research. It's important to remember, though, that correlation is not causation. There seems to be an assumption through all of this (and the multitude of similar content that is being produce on this theme) that what occurred together in the past is more likely to occur together in the future. I'd say this is like trying to predict the stock market.

You can always trust a 'study' that doesn't disclose its methodology in any helpful way. How are you defining emotions? How are you parsing texts and assigning them to emotional responses? How is this anything but a mix of the same old new-media 'virality' bs with the word 'data' thrown in every paragraph or so?

Henley and Noah, thanks for compiling this heap data. It really helped a lot especially the value of putting images as well as making Tuesday your favorite day!

It's amazing to get in touch with influencers, I had a chance to interview some influencers in my niche and noted them about the published article. And it have had done it. I got more shares in few days.

Something which might work fantastically well: if you could somehow get your college professors to share your content, say, by producing something that's related to what they taught you...they could use you as a case study to their students and you'd score a .edu backlink!

Do you have any data for content length and the inclusion of images increasing the likelihood of social sharing? I'm wondering whether shorter content with an image included can still generate social sharing?

Well, we analyzed 100 million articles, and found that longer content with images tend to garner more shares on average, than shorter content. Short form content can definitely still garner shares, it's just that there's so much of it published daily, and a low % of them get shared widely. But that's not the case for long-form content, we discovered.

One further tip is to look for the influencers already in your audience when trying to build relationships, they may be an easier sell as they already know and are interested in you. I am building a site to help find those influencers in your email list at http://hulimail.com, if anyone is interested in joining the beta drop me an email, robin at the domain above 🙂

This is what you call an in-depth article! Talk about pearls of wisdom, so called content kings, queens and princesses (I speak for myself) - this article is a fountain of knowledge, to be taken advantage of I would say.

Very interesting and quite a good read on Wednesday Morning. I usually run a manual search to curate people who share the content in same niche i.e for my seo blog I find out relevant people (normal and influencers) and try to engage them. Ultimately they all help me to promote my blog posts.

Sometimes I visit their blogs and comment on them like i did here and try to add value. There is no hard and fast formula to make your content viral so whatever works for you is the best for you!

As a writer, I try to make all the stuff I write go viral. Your post has really opened my eyes to the necessity of having a CHECKLIST for all viral elements a blog post or article must have before I click the SUBMIT button. Thank you for your hard work and effort. You definitely made a BuzzSumo convert out of me!

This is an awesome article! This afternoon I'll be writing a blog post entitled "What career should you actually have?" lol 😉 I love to see statistics supporting the various theories floating around online.

This is very interesting. Is it possible to put a finer slice on the article length data? I suspect based on observation and my own behaviour that articles from 50-200 words are shareable; articles from 200-800 words are dead and articles over 800 words are meaty enough to get passed along. Can this be validated?

Wow! What an epic post, thank you for this. I've found some success being as Gary V coined it a "social DJ," using a combination of sharing other really good long form posts (like this) that are of value/interesting/funny and then adding in my own content as well. Absolutely going to keep all these tips in mind!

What has worked really nice for me recently is to give people the 'steps' to solving their problem, but then giving away something that makes the whole process a lot easier.
Strategically this is given away by either email (as most people do), but depending on the objective I would throw in the 'pay with social media' function.

In the above piece I wrote a nice meaty piece (using Scrivener - thanks to Appsumo 🙂 ) on how to build a target customer profile. I go a step further then by giving away the actual template for getting it done easier.

It's gotten really nice shares and solid spike in visitors. Got a few hundred unique visits from it and I didn't market this to any influencers at all. Just tweeted about it, shared it on Facebook and Google+ and it went from there.

The key is to make sure your content is quality and that it solves a problem otherwise you're not getting jack squat shared.

Great research! I have personally noticed that I get more shares on linkedin than on fb during the day probably since most of my target audience is on their work computer where fb but not linkedin, is blocked off. I'm still trying to figure out what type of image (inspirational, career focused, funny) cube dwellers like to reshare.

So, it may be a little labor intensive, but I'll put a post up somewhere (with a call to action, with a picture, using a lot of the suggestions here) AND THEN I make a handwritten list of 15 people.

These are people who I "think" have a community reach that would find the article/podcast/event that I'm sharing interesting. And then...I call them on the phone. I know, old school... I say something like:

Viral definitely doesn't equal value BUT it certainly doesn't hurt to get a lot of eyes on your content. Perhaps the post itself isn't necessarily value but if your blog is quality, when people come over, they will see what else you have to offer, and potentially convert. It's also great from a link building perspective.